Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) has been one of Great Britain’s best loved artists since the middle of the nineteenth century. His wide catalog of work proves that he was an artist of exceptional talent and was capable of painting any subject well. Due to the commercial success of his later work, Millais has been accused of turning away from artistic innovation while pandering to Victorian audiences for financial gain. Such accusations diminish the memory of Millais as an innovative artist who continually evolved throughout his career. By taking a fresh look at his artwork, this paper shows that Millais was always challenging himself with difficult subject matter throughout his career, sometimes developing new artistic techniques to express the uncomfortable or the intangible.

Pre-Raphaelites

Sir John Everett Millais

19th Century

British Empire

British Art

Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
has been one of Great Britain’s best loved artists since the middle of the
nineteenth century. His wide catalog of work proves that he was an artist of exceptional
talent and was capable of painting any subject well. Due to the commercial
success of his later work, Millais has been accused of turning away from
artistic innovation while pandering to Victorian audiences for financial gain.
Such accusations diminish the memory of Millais as an innovative artist who
continually evolved throughout his career. By taking a fresh look at his
artwork, I will show that he was always challenging himself with difficult
subject matter, sometimes developing new artistic techniques to express the
uncomfortable or the intangible.

Looking at his whole catalog of work, I
realized that Millais truly had a penchant for the macabre. He addressed themes
of death and the afterlife throughout his long career. Millais seems to have
had two missions with this work: First, he wanted to challenge viewers and
himself to address their mortality with themes of death and dying. Second, he
wanted to challenge himself with the difficult task of depicting the intangible
with his ghost paintings.

John Everett Millais, Age from The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1845). Photo: Archive.org.

which he produced in 1845. This work depicts Death as
a shrouded skeleton creeping up on an aged man from behind. Death has laid
aside his scythe in order to grab the man with two bony hands. Three children
look on; one seems awestruck, one cries, the other pays no attention as he
plays a flute. The skeleton is rendered with great anatomical precision.
According to art historian Roger Bowdler, this sort of imagery––death depicted
as a skeleton––was unusual in nineteenth-century England.1

Millais delves more deeply into the
macabre with The Disentombment of Queen
Matilda(fig. 2).

His drawing
depicts a gruesome event in French history when, in 1562, Calvinists desecrated
the tombs of William the Conqueror and Matilda, his queen. The pen and ink
drawing shows a chaotic scene in which horrified nuns look on as a throng of
grave robbers pull corpses from their tombs. One man offers the abbess a ring which
he has just removed from the decomposing hand of Queen Matilda.

The young artist shows a personal
confrontation with death in The Artist
Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl(fig. 3).

John Everett Millais, The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl (c.1847), Tate Gallery, oil on board, 18.7 x 25.7 cm. Photo: The Athenaeum.

Here, we see Millais from
behind, standing by a coffin. He is looking down at the serene face of the
deceased, as his hands are “nervously smoothing the band of his top hat.”2
Perhaps this experience is his inspiration for painting the maiden Ophelia as
he did just a few years later.

painted
in 1851, has become Millais’s most
popular work in contemporary times. This depiction of Ophelia after death was
an unusual way to present the tragic Shakespearean character. Ophelia was a popular
character among nineteenth-century artists, but she was typically shown in her
madness, clinging to a tree, moments before her death by suicide. This
representation of Ophelia captures her just before the murky waters swallow
her. Ophelia’s delicate face is frozen in death, eyes glazed, lips parted, her
hair and gown floating on the water’s surface. At her midsection, her hands
float limply having just released the flowers which she held in her last
minutes. Her deeply submerged waist is enhanced by her floating hands and
skirts. The disappearance of the young woman’s waist beneath the dark water
strikes a chord of dread in viewers who realize that the rest of her body will
soon follow. Millais’s disturbing image of Ophelia effectively evoked strong
emotions in his Victorian audience, who were sometimes brought to tears by the
painting. According to art historian Alison Smith, “[t]he picture’s appearance at
the Exposition Universelle at Paris in 1855 led to the recognition of Millais
as a painter of international stature.”3

Millais’s first known depiction of the
supernatural, A Ghost Appearing at a
Wedding Ceremony(fig. 5),

was drawn around 1853-54. This drawing is a reflection of his life
circumstances during this time. He was separated from his love, Euphemia
“Effie” Gray Ruskin, as she was seeking an annulment of her marriage to John
Ruskin. The drawing depicts a ghost appearing to a bride just as her groom
offers her the wedding ring. The bride shrinks back into the arms of her
attendants as the ghost, with feet bound in ball and chains, descends into the
scene. The drawing is inscribed, “I don’t! I don’t!”4
Millais successfully conveys the ghost’s translucent body by rendering its form
with vague, lightly defined lines, and allowing the stronger lines forming the
drawing’s other elements to penetrate the ghost’s form. This drawing is a
precursor to Millais’s future work depicting the supernatural, such as Spring (1859).

seems to be a celebration of life. It depicts
blossoming apple trees and a group of young girls on the verge of womanhood.
Apple blossoms fill the background. In the foreground are eight girls lounging
on the grass as they eat “curds, milk, and cream.”5
This pleasant image of English country life is disturbed by the presence of a
scythe resting above the only girl who is fully reclined while gazing at the
viewer. Her languishing legs and upper body give her an erotic appearance, but
her pale face and staring eyes are rather corpse-like. With the scythe, a
symbol of death, resting above the beauty, viewers are reminded that the girl’s
approaching womanhood brings her nearer to her impending death. This painting
was difficult to sell, perhaps due to its disturbing message. It was
eventually purchased by a collector who had owned another painting by Millais, The Vale of Rest(fig. 7).

all Millais’s work, The Vale of Rest (1858-9) was his favorite.6
This dark scene depicts two nuns at the task of preparing a grave. As one nun
focuses on digging the grave, the other gazes at the viewer as she sits at the
edge of the grave with a rosary in her hands. A pick is partially visible in
the foreground as it leans out of the grave, in the direction of the viewer.
The grave is also only partially visible because it runs toward the viewer at
eye level. In this way, the viewer is placed in the grave. The background’s
vivid sunset is a striking contrast to the shadowy trees and the chapel bell
tower at midground. The painting’s mood is quiet and contemplative, prompting
viewers to consider their own mortality.

is not about death or the
afterlife, but it is worth considering due to the part it plays in the
evolution of Millais’s painting technique and due to its unusual theme––the
state of animated sleep. The Somnambulist depicts
a woman dressed in a white gown, holding a brass candle lantern. It appears
that the flame has just been extinguished by the breeze. She walks along a
rocky path at the edge of a cliff which falls down to the sea. The woman’s
blank expression and fixed gaze indicate her unconscious state. Her white gown
and pale face are illuminated by the moonlight. According to Millais’s son, J.
G. Millais, the painting was inspired by an incident that occurred one night
when John Everett Millais was walking home with two friends. They heard a
woman’s scream, then a beautiful young woman dressed in white emerged from
behind a garden gate of a nearby villa. She rushed past the three men, her
flowing white robes glowing in the moonlight. Millais exclaimed “What a lovely
woman!” and his friend Wilkie Collins ran to her aid. Interestingly, the young
woman was escaping after being held prisoner by a man in the villa. She had
been kept “under mesmeric influence” for months.7
This unusual incident captured Millais’s imagination, inspiring him to
represent the poor woman in his art as a sleepwalker and later as a ghost. The Somnambulist is a forerunner of
Millais’s pinnacle ghost painting.

also called The
Ghost Chamber, is Millais’s “first ghostly painting.”8
The theme is based on a legendary ghost who is said to haunt a Scottish castle. Millais painted his daughter, Alice, under electric light to obtain the
“other-worldly” appearance of the “spectral grey woman.”9
The setting is a turret-room staircase at Murthly Castle in Perthshire,
Scotland. Millais painted the staircase
on site for another project, but later abandoned using it. However, he found
good use for the intriguing staircase in this ghostly composition. Using loose
brush work and muted colors, he achieved a spectral effect by blending her face
and portions of her body into the shadowy background. The only definitive form
of her ghostly body is her pale, outstretched arm which is illuminated by the
light spilling from a small window on the staircase. The painting was regarded
as a highly successful ghost painting, capturing the dual nature of the
supernatural as people felt it should.10

the pinnacle of Millais’s ghostly pictures, is
also his last large-scale narrative painting. Painted about a year prior to his death, it is a successful culmination of all his previous works of a
supernatural theme. In the composition, a veiled woman dressed in a luminous
white gown draws back the curtains of a four-poster bed. A startled man sits up
from the bed and reaches toward her as her pale face gazes at him. Only the
shadow of the man’s hand makes contact with the spectral figure. Although she
looks toward the man, her expression appears disconnected from his emotional
response to seeing her. The ghostly woman’s trance-like expression and her
luminous white dress are reminiscent of The Somnambulist(fig. 8).

According to
Alison Smith, “In this work Millais was clearly probing the boundary between
reality and delusion.” The painting is “the artist’s realist interpretation of
a supernatural theme”; therefore he went to great pains “to ground the
apparition in material reality” 11
by basing the background in a real location––Murthly Castle­­. He also
purchased an antique four-poster bed specifically for the purpose of copying it
for the painting. The lamp was copied from one he saw and studied at the South
Kensington Museum.12

All of Millais’s effort proved to be
worthwhile. Upon viewing the painting, art critic Marion H. Spielmann commented
to Millais that he “‘could not tell whether the apparition were a spirit or a
woman.’ Millais responded, ‘That’s just what I want. I don’t know either, nor
does he,’ [Millais] added as he pointed toward [the man in] the painting.”13
Spielmann wrote, “It is a matter of some interest that Sir John Millais––as he
told the writer––has had this subject in mind for more than twenty years, ‘and
at last,’ he added with a smile, ‘I’ve done it!’”14
The painting truly was a success. After its exhibition at the Royal Academy, Speak! Speak! was purchased for the
nation for 2,000 pounds, which was an “enormous sum that marked the esteem in
which Millais was held at the end of his career.”15

Some might ask, “Why was John Everett
Millais so obsessed with death and the afterlife?” He was a product of his
time. Victorian people were quite concerned about these topics, and their concern
with death can be attributed to high mortality rates in the nineteenth century.
Millais experienced the loss of friends and loved ones often. On more than one
occasion he was called to the bedside of friends who were dying or had just
died. In 1870, Charles Dickens’s daughter
invited Millais, who was her father’s close friend, to sketchCharles Dickens (After Death). According to Millais’s son, who
accompanied his father on this event, “He intended at first to make only a
little outline drawing, but the features of the great novelist struck him as
being so calm and beautiful in death that he ended by making a finished
portrait.”16

Millais declared to F.G. Stephens that
he was “not the sort of man who is accused of very deep Religious Sentiment, or
reflection,”17 but that did not prevent him from returning to the themes of death and the
afterlife throughout his long career. In fact, mortality seems to be his life’s
theme. According to Bowdler, “[w]hen created a baronet in 1885, Millais chose as
his motto the epigram Ars longa, vita
brevis, life is short but art endures.”18
His preoccupation with dying is a constant thread in his career, linking his
Pre-Raphaelite work with his later career as an Academician. In 1851, the young
Millais wrote in a letter that he wanted “to affect those who may look on [his
work] with the uncertainty of life and the necessity of always being prepared
for death.”19

Millais represented man’s mortality in
less obvious ways; for instance, some of his late landscapes approach the
theme. When his son George died in 1878, Millais retreated to his artwork,
producing Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness. In the bleak scene a blonde-headed young man, like George Millais,
is rowing a boat over the choppy waters of Loch Ness toward the gloomy Urquhart
Castle, which stands in the distance under a stormy winter sky.

Millais dealt with his impending death
similarly. By the early 1890s his health had declined sharply. He was suffering
from throat cancer when he painted Blow,
Blow Thou Winter Wind(fig. 11)

in 1892. In this bleak winter landscape, a
dark-haired woman in the foreground sits sadly looking down while a dog at
midground is howling. In the background, a man with his head tilted and hanging
walks into the distance. His stature and clothing remind me of Millais. This
landscape is a representation of the end of Millais’s life, and through his artwork, Millais had the ability
to express the inexpressible.

Due to his ill health, Millais sent
nothing to the Academy in 1894, the first time since 1866.20
But, by 1895 he returned to exhibiting. Critics noticed the dark mood of his
paintings; two of the four paintings exhibited were Speak!
Speak! and Time the Reaper(fig. 12).

John Everett Millais, Time, the Reaper (1895), location and dimensions unknown.

The latter was a departure for Millais due to its traditional
symbolism. In the painting, Death approaches a door carrying a scythe. An
hourglass, in which the sand has run out, stands at his feet. Millais was his
own model; he used a photograph of himself in profile for the Reaper.21
No doubt the theme of these paintings indicated his awareness that his life was
nearing its end. He wrote, “Are you surprised that I have come back to the
solemn subjects of my early years?”22

Although Millais was not a deeply
religious man, so much concern about death would have given him good reason to
contemplate the afterlife. He was a product of the Victorian era and the
nineteenth century has been called the “heyday of the Middle Class Ghost.”23 Many
Victorian people were interested in the spirit world and the possibility of
communicating with those beyond the grave. Spiritualism, a religious practice
in which basic tenets of Christianity were overlaid with communing with the
dead, was in its heyday. The Society for Psychical Research was founded by
Frederick Myers in 1882. Its purpose was to “subject ghosts to the principles
of modern scientific enquiry.”24
Millais was neither a Spiritualist nor a member of the Society for Psychical
Research, but he was aware of its existence; he painted a portrait of Myers's wife in 1874.25

Like his contemporaries, Millais
enjoyed the idea of a spirit world. His brother, William Millais, tells of an
adventure John Everett Millais and his friend John Leech had while on a fishing
trip in the Highlands. The pair had a ghostly encounter while staying at an
ancient Scottish manor house called Cowdray Hall. A ghost awakened both men as
they felt themselves being violently shaken by an invisible force. They spent
the rest of the night in the hallway rather than the haunted room. In the
story’s end, the ghost turned out to be an earthquake.26
No doubt the excitement of the experience captured Millais’s imagination.

The Victorian ghost craze was a result
of peoples’ growing doubts about survival of the body for actual resurrection.
This prompted them to hope for at least a survival of personality beyond the
grave. To Victorians, ghosts were evidence of the survival of personality. In
turn, the subject of ghost pictures was “the survival of personality and
outward bodily form after death.”27
Millais, an accomplished portrait painter with a keen ability to capture
personality of the human face, would have been especially interested in
conveying personality with an ethereal body. This compelled him to return to
the theme of death and the afterlife throughout his career. He finally
succeeded at conveying the convergence of the ethereal with the natural world
by the end of his life. Accomplishing such a task and receiving positive
reviews of this enigmatic artwork gave Millais a sense of professional
accomplishment at the end of his life.

In the end, John Everett Millais
accomplished much with his macabre artwork. He challenged viewers and himself
to face mortality through his themes of death and dying. He also rose to his
personal challenge which was accomplishing the difficult task of depicting that
which is intangible. Throughout his career, Millais continually approached
difficult subject matter, sometimes developing new techniques in order to
accomplish his goals of presenting the inexpressible and the intangible, some
of art’s most difficult themes.

Jane Custer received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History as well as a Certificate in Public History from Kennesaw State University in May 2015. Her current research interest involves the social history of diverse populations in the western hemisphere. She is especially interested in cross-cultural interactions in America and its effect on artistic expression. Her article “Stripped of Her Power: Sebastiano Ricci’s Susanna and the Elders” was published in Valley Humanities Review, Spring 2015. She is considering pursuing a graduate degree in Museum Studies or Archives and Records Management.